


Let Not Light See My Black and Deep Desires

by MusicalChick13



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Also Mycroft appears at the end and feels extremely awkward, And by "Implied" I mean it definitely obviously happened it's just not explicit, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, birthday shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 07:36:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10157639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicalChick13/pseuds/MusicalChick13
Summary: The second time he examines his reflection, a red, theoretical day-calendar appears in his mind palace, each day filled with his own cursive sprawl in theoretical black ink, revealing the him-as-stranger’s activities of the past week.(Solved case. Got punched. Mourned the death of a close friend. Bought milk.)But on the both of spaces designated for yesterday and today, only two words are present.--Sexually active.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So, this fic is based on this post--> https://throughtheparadox.tumblr.com/post/157521599683/randombiochemist-francesca-wayland-i-had-the
> 
> And, to quote "The Sign of Three," "[All of this] just sort of...happened."

 

Sherlock Holmes had never really seen the so-called “point” of birthdays. What did a human accomplish simply by being born? Did people really need to designate a specific day of the year on which they could eat cake without feeling guilty about it?

Birthdays were merely a meaningless excuse to demand poorly-chosen presents from one’s friends that the recipient would never use anyway under the guise of celebrating a mediocre, senseless, insipid adult bringing another human into the world to grow up into yet another mediocre, senseless, insipid adult.

So, when John asks him when his birthday is, he doesn’t reply. It isn’t important; it is so insignificant it doesn’t even bear the energy it would take to dismiss the question.

But the first year of his vacation from the land of the living, while he and The Woman are taking down Moriarty’s network, holed up in a hostel in Paris, she hands him a card on his way out the door to meet a contact. Not much. A simple white card inscribed with an incongruously ornate black W and “Regards” scrawled hastily in black ink at the bottom. “Happy birthday,” she says, the left side of her mouth quirked upward almost imperceptibly.

He narrows his eyes, only _half_ -suspiciously. “How did you know?”

“I was bored,” she replies, accompanied by a careless shrug. After which she turns around and seats herself on the bed with a gracefulness incompatible with the squalid state of the room.

This is all that is said on the subject.

              

* * *

 

_Happy birthday. Have a slice of cake for me, in lieu of dinner._

He vainly hopes that John will simply nod at him in understanding and leave the room.

He is, of course, wrong.

“I’m going to make a deduction.” “Happy birthday.” “How does it work?” “ _You bloody moron_.” “ ** _Trust you to fall for a sociopath_**.”

“Falling for” someone. What a ridiculous notion. Ordinary humans and their silly, whimsical semantics.

_As if anything ordinary could ever describe either of them. As if the words **existed** , even in the most brilliant mind._

When they return from the cake place, a sickly saccharine taste in his mouth, Sherlock refuses to acknowledge the way he practically races up the stairs to make use of his phone in private.

**_Cake was never a food for which I harbored much love. –SH_ **

**_It IS okay to end a sentence with a preposition, you know. You’re not Winston Churchill_ ** **.**

**_I suppose you’re going to lecture me on how language “evolves,” then? -SH_ **

**_You know, you’d solve cases faster if you didn’t spend so much of your energy being needlessly pretentious._ **

**_I solve them quickly enough. –SH_ **

**_Oh, do you, now?_** _  
_

A minute ticks by.

**_How about this one: where am I?_ **

**_With what clues? –SH_ **

**_Oh, come now Mister Holmes, you of all people should know man was not born to rest._**

Ah, yes, Voltaire. How…appropriate. _“We must cultivate our own garden…”  
_

The Garden of Eden. The Eden Centre.

 _“Nights of passion in High Wycombe…”_ John really was a lot cleverer than he realized.

**_There are 107 shops, a bowling alley, a cinema, and a library. Do you expect me to search them all? –SH_ **

**_I expect you…to think._ **

****

* * *

 

Considering he hails a cab at ten after five, having successfully juggled conversations around so John and Molly both think the other is watching him, it’s a wonder he even makes it to High Wycombe by the time the shops close at six.

He finds her at the Patisserie Valerie.

_Winston Churchill, infamous coiner of the phrase “up with which I will not put,” a likely misattribution due to a joke that appeared in an issue of the Strand and had not fully entered the public consciousness as his quote until 1946._

_Thus, he was looking for shop address 46._

_This, combined with the reference to cake, pointed to the Patisserie._

She nurses a cup of tea, at a table meant for two in the back corner, an enigmatic smile on her lips.

 _Lipstick: Sisley L33 rouge passion_.

For the rest of her, she might as well have appeared nude before him again, with how unreadable she was.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t show.”

“No you weren’t.”

“No.” Her smile widens predatorily. “It _is_ your birthday. How do you suggest we spend it?”

“I’d imagine your own answer to that question is why you summoned me here.”

“Is it?”

“You tell me.”

“Because you can’t figure it out for yourself?”

He feels a smirk spread across his face. “Because this could very well be the last night of the world.”

As she kisses the corner of his mouth in a show of uncharacteristic demureness, breath softly grazing his cheek, right hand curling _just so_ around his shoulder, he almost loses his bearings and shoves her up against the counter in front of the staff and few stragglers left in the Patisserie to finish what she’s started.

Thankfully, they (somehow) make it outside to two separate cabs, first. They leave 20 minutes apart as an extra precaution, and she has the driver drop her off several streets away.

Once back at his flat, they have the decency to wait until they get inside. But only barely.

 

* * *

 

He gets a text from Mycroft at about noon.

**_At Whitehall. Stolen naval treaty. I’m sending someone to retrieve you in an hour._ **

With a groan, Sherlock lifts himself off of the couch where the two of them are intertwined and busies himself with looking somewhat presentable.

_The last thing he needed right now was Mycroft making unoriginally demeaning comments.  
_

Before he exits the living room, he glances behind him, drinks in the sight of her in his dressing gown, nonchalantly draped over the couch, somehow still looking perfectly-kept in spite of her dishevelment from the previous evening’s (and subsequent morning’s) activities.

And then he mentally curses his older brother.

After briefly running a comb through his hair and putting on a suitable change of clothes, he turns his glance to the mirror, to see what he can read.

 _If I were a stranger and I looked at myself, what deductions could I make_?

The first time he looks, he doesn’t register anything at all; his brain is still foggy from…everything. It had been a rather busy night. And morning.

(He allows himself a wry smile.)

The second time he examines his reflection, a red, theoretical day-calendar appears in his mind palace, each day filled with his own cursive sprawl in theoretical black ink, revealing the him-as-stranger’s activities of the past week.

_Solved case. Got punched. Mourned the death of a close friend. Bought milk._

But on the both of spaces designated for yesterday and today, only two words are present.

 _Sexually active_.

He sees, rather than feels himself start backward before cautiously approaching the mirror again.

He does a more thorough sweep this time, looking at every observable plane and angle of his body for any other piece of available data.

Still the two words hang stubbornly in the air on the mind palace-calendar: _Sexually active_.

The tension he normally carried in his shoulders was gone, his upper body relaxed in a way it hadn’t been in quite some time.

_Well, there was no way to fix **that**. Trying to generate tension where there was none was only going to look artificial, and even if that weren’t a concern, the idea that he could accurately, consciously replicate every single minuscule nuance of his normal shoulder and torso position was absolutely ridiculous and would more than likely result in looking more divorced from his default posture than he did currently._

But there was one thing he _could_ fix.

Sherlock races to turn on the shower ( _Noticeable traces of sweat, specifically from the apocrine glands, producing a slight, yet subtly detectable odor_ ) before realizing that this will accomplish nothing. Mycroft will know that he took a shower and question why, considering that Sherlock has always showered during the late evening, with the exception of nights when he never came home at all. And suspecting Sherlock never came home would lead to the assumption that he had been getting high somewhere, which meant questioning, which meant coming up with a plausible lie, which, if not believed, probably meant blaming John for not keeping a better watch on him. Which meant questioning from John. Which meant lying.

_Repeat ad nauseum._

_Besides, extra focus on scrubbing the scalp and armpits would be readily apparent, implying the shower was necessitated by sweat, presumably from vigorous activity, and Mycroft knew better than to think Sherlock would ever do any sort of actual exercise.  
_

_And he would knew Sherlock couldn’t have possibly gotten himself deep enough into another challenging case to the point where any sort of chase or physical activity was necessary. Not yet, not this soon after wrapping up all of the Culverton Smith business.  
_

He could try some cologne to mask the scent, but it would draw even more attention to him than a shower.

Then it hit him.

 _Cigarettes_.

 _The Woman always carried them with her_. _They could mask the smell and provide a Mycroft-suitable (albeit just barely) explanation for what he’d been up to in the past twenty-four hours._

She had left her purse in the bathroom. He digs through it like an angry badger before ripping a fresh pack of Marlboro Ultralights from the bag’s confines.

Another few seconds of rooting around show that she did not pack a lighter, so he storms to the kitchen and practically rips the second drawer from the left off its slides in his haste to retrieve the pack of matches kept there.

“The only way you’re going to get your desired result is if you take that cigarette and smear it directly on your shirt as it’s smoking. And even then, you run the risk of burning a hole through it.” Her voice is much closer than he expected, much louder. He turns to sees her in the doorway sporting an amused, yet dangerously self-satisfied smirk and poised against the left side of the doorframe with an effortless elegance, as if it existed solely for the purpose of providing her somewhere to lean.

“Shame to ruin such a nice shirt, I should think.” Her smirk grows _just_ noticeably closer to a grin as she straightens herself up and turns to head back into the living room.

Three steps.

She stops.

Then turns her head to purr over her shoulder, “Especially when there are other, _much_ more enjoyable ways of destroying it.”

And if the concept of obscenity could be distilled into a single expression, it would be the one on her face right now.

He swallows, _two, three, four times_ , but it’s too late. The damage has already been done. There is a pulsing in his groin that is _most certainly_ not conducive to his current objective.

He contemplates simply cutting his losses until he remembers he’d subconsciously noticed something else. He didn’t know what it was-only that it was there.

( _Another instance of his brain absorbing information too quickly for him to keep pace with, it seems_.)

Curious (and hopeful that he can still salvage the situation), Sherlock jogs back to the bathroom.

The Woman, once again lounging on the couch, chuckles quietly as he does so.

When he plants himself in front of the mirror once more, he doesn’t see anything. Whatever else it was he’d noticed, it’s gone. (Or maybe the dopamine, for lack of a better term- _high_ -is just impeding his ability to think properly and making him see things that aren’t there.)

However, when he elects to ignore it and, instead, begins the walk back to his room to fetch a pair of socks, the two words that have been preoccupying him for the past twenty minutes flash viciously again.

_Sexually Active.  
_

But…?

 _Right leg_ , his brain insists, although he has no idea why.

Upon returning to the bathroom, he takes several steps while watching himself in the mirror. _Somewhat favoring left leg, right leg does not bend to normal extent when lifting it up and is facing slightly inward...  
_

Yes, John _had_ punched him in the face, but he hadn’t recently sustained any sort of leg injury, so why was he—

 _Oh_.

_Nail marks.  
_

_Her nails had left visible scratches on his right thigh and he was subconsciously trying to minimize the extent to which his trouser fabric rubbed up against the skin there in order to avoid irritating it.  
_

He attempted to walk normally, but now that he knew the source of the change in his gait (and was now _very_ vividly mentally reliving the situation in question) he found- much to what he _refused_ to admit was his embarrassment-he now had the opposite problem.

_He was **trying** to aggravate it, recreate the intoxicating, pleasurable edge of the pain.  
_

_If, by some miracle, nothing else gave him away, **that** certainly would._

_Perhaps if he wore some looser trousers? Less chance of fabric-skin contact._

Mrs. Hudson, out of concern for him, had done his laundry and, during her last visit, had dropped the clean clothes off in the living room. (Considering his intricate system of hanging and organizing his clothes, she knew better than to try to do _that_ herself.) Given all that had happened regarding the Culverton Smith case, he hadn’t had time to move everything back to his room.

When he reaches the living room (at this point, he is full-on sprinting) and catches The Woman’s eye, she briefly glances down at his right thigh with a knowing smirk before flicking her eyes back up to his, her chest heaving with a silent, barely suppressed chuckle. She says nothing. But she knows.

He takes an armful of clothes, runs back to the bathroom, and begins sifting through them.

_No. No. Absolutely not. Even tighter than the last pair. No.  
_

_…Mildly looser.  
_

He tries puts them on so quickly he fumbles at least three times in doing so.

He takes a few experimental steps.

_Sexually active??  
_

_No longer obvious. Merely an (extremely likely) possibility. He supposed it was possible that Mycroft, unsuspecting of something he would probably consider a ridiculous notion, would miss it completely or wave it away with another explanation of his own invention.  
_

With twenty minutes before he had to leave, that was good enough for him. Or, at least, it would have to be.

It comes to his attention that he smells smoke.

 _No_.

He rushes back into the living room, and she has migrated to the chair, a cigarette hanging, teasingly, from her lips.

She locks her eyes onto his and slowly, almost _painfully_ so, removes the cigarette and blows a ring of smoke in front of her, pursing her lips in a way that somehow manages to be equal parts alluring and terrifying, despite being attached to so mundane an action.

They stay there for a few seconds, neither of them moving, and she repeats the process again.

_Stay home. Write off Mycroft.  
_

He closes his eyes and (somehow) reorients himself.

_No._

Her eyes narrow.

 _Fine_.

He makes for the kitchen, to retrieve his phone and wallet; when he turns back, she has readjusted herself, lying face-up across the couch, the dressing gown pulled up to reveal several inches more of her legs while covering _just enough_ skin to still be considered “tasteful” by polite society.

 _Oh, she’s good_.

_(Then again, she always has been.)_

Going back to his room feels more like a retreat than a simple quest to find a belt. Which is probably why he comes back out immediately instead of opting for a practical strategy of avoiding her machinations by remaining in his bedroom until Mycroft’s flunky picks him up.

(It _certainly_ wasn’t for any other reason...)

She is still laying down, but the cigarette from earlier is now between her teeth. One arm has moved to prop up her head, the other pretending to brush away wayward strands of hair in a manner that is perfectly calculated to look absent-minded but Sherlock knows from experience is simply another tactic that exposes her neck.

_He also knows from experience that it has worked every time.  
_

_You don’t **really** want to leave, _ her maneuvers suggest, wordlessly.

Sherlock straightens himself up, forces his eyes to fixate on hers (and not on any other part of her body), with an over-compensatory intensity that surprises even him.

 _Of course I do_.

She looks momentarily impressed before she resumes her earlier, face-up position. She does not look at him. It is not an obvious, feigned ignorance, nor is it a cold or hostile one; she simply turns her face away as if she has passed a stranger on a street who she thought looked familiar before deciding that she doesn’t know them.

Three minutes pass, and she still does not look at him, choosing to stare drolly at the ceiling, holding the cigarette in her right hand. Sherlock doesn’t know why he finds this so infuriating when he had all but _explicitly asked her_ to stop not long ago.

And then she takes another drag, puffs out another ring of smoke, and closes her eyes briefly, in self-indulgence.

And Sherlock finds himself closing the distance between them. He plucks the cigarette out of her hand, extinguishes it, and hurls it on the ground, his eyes never once leaving hers.

She moves to sit up (presumably so as to be in a position less suggestive of vulnerability) and, as she does so, raises her eyebrows, slightly. That small action alone causes his heart to beat approximately 1.47 times faster.

_Giving up?_

He grabs both of her shoulders and pushes her backwards into the back of the couch.

 _Oh, far from it_.

“I thought you had a meeting,” she remarks dryly, happy to speak now that she’s gotten what she wants.

A smirk that mirrors her own spreads across Sherlock’s face as he replies, “I still have thirteen minutes.”

 

* * *

 

Thirteen minutes turns into two-and-a-half hours. When one of Mycroft’s drone workers comes to fetch him, Sherlock goes to the door, makes a cursory deduction, and threatens to tell the man’s wife that he sold her precious collection of rare video games in order to pay for his gambling debt unless he turns around and tells Mycroft that Sherlock is nonfunctionally ill.

At the end of those two-and-a-half hours, there are thirty text messages from Mycroft.

**_I know you aren’t sick._ **

**_Sherlock._ **

**_For goodness’s sake, Sherlock, do a service to your country just this once_**.

And twenty-seven more like them.

_He did have to admit, recovering stolen government documents, presumably ones only accessible to those with a high clearance, did sound vaguely interesting._

With a roll of his eyes and no small amount of grumbling, he reclothes himself, slips on his jacket, and grabs his wallet and phone. As he heads out the door, he turns around, and The Woman is gone.

Her very distinct text tone emanates from his pocket moments later.

**_Until we meet again. Mr. Holmes._ **

He smiles, in spite of himself.

 

* * *

 

 When he finally arrives at Whitehall, several of the officials involved with the case have left. Only two gentlemen, Lady Smallwood, and his brother remain.

“And what could possibly have been so important that you—” Mycroft begins.

Sherlock feels something that feels suspiciously like humiliation burn across his cheeks and the tips of his ears. But as Mycroft averts his gaze so quickly it threatens to give him whiplash and claps his hands over his face before slowly sliding them off to rest at his sides, expression a curious amalgamation of confusion, disgust, haughty skepticism, and laughably overdramatic _terror_ , Sherlock decides that it’s worth it.

“Never mind. I don’t want to know.” And he exits the room, calling over his shoulder, “Lady Smallwood, give Sherlock the case details. I have become unexpectedly unwell.”

_Oh, yes; definitely worth it._


End file.
